


Blue, burning

by orphan_account



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Alcohol, Drugs, F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-07
Updated: 2015-09-12
Packaged: 2018-04-19 15:30:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4751531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chapter 3: In another world, you’d remember Chloe Price. You would remember train tracks, blown-out junkyard tires, empty midnight diner runs. The rush and disgust of wet mud against your palms, and stray splinters and grass caught up in a skirt you probably spent too much on. (Chloe-centric flash fics from Max and Victoria's perspectives.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She is fire. Burning blue, white, glowing under black light, on cracked tiles and brushed up against stained, chipped linoleum. She’d be the perfect shot. Victoria/Chloe. Pre-game, post-Rachel going missing.

She _is_ fire. Burning blue, white, _glowing_ under black light, on cracked tiles and brushed up against stained, chipped linoleum. There is a fire in the way she _looks_ at a room. There is no ownership. There _is_ distaste, shy of disgust. Beer, jungle juice, a bowl making its rounds. Three games of beer pong in the back corner of the kitchen. Bodies erratic, no rhythm. A few trying (and failing) to get privacy in preemptively locked rooms.

 _She_ belongs, but there are too many here who don’t. And her look bores straight through you.

You don’t know her name, and you’re buzzed enough not to let curiosity tear you away from Nathan. The asshole doesn’t even know you’re there. Too much of something he shouldn’t have gotten. Not enough of what he needs. What else is new? But you still hold him upright on a beaten couch, his weight swaying in arms meant to steady, not comfort.

You try to ignore it, but you _know_ when her eyes settle on him—and it sends electricity up your neck.

She’d be the perfect shot. Her glow against this dim, this haze. When the amber of her cigarette and flash of her lighter spark something alive. She is a heartbeat louder than the music. She is what you could never be.

And you know when that moment passes, when her flame dies away in the smoke and blur. She’s gone. The fire capped shut. And there _you_ are, alone.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Your best friend is not the girl who died first on the bathroom floor. Or the girl killed with an IV and a promise. You write over the universe like a scratched CD, used again and again and again—and the cracks are starting to show. Max/Chloe. Post-episode 4.

You know you’re detached from this reality, and every reality after that. Your best friend is _not_ the girl who died first on the bathroom floor. Or the girl killed with an IV and a promise. Or the girl shot in the junkyard (twice). Or the girl who wondered, first, if you could tell the future, when you knew you couldn’t. You write over the universe like a scratched CD, used again and again and again—and the cracks are starting to show.

You don’t know who you’re supposed to be. You don’t know how reality ebbs, flows, tangles without _you_. You wonder if you can undo time forever. You want to go back to the point beyond your ( _this_ Max’s) memory when time became a deadly game.

What’s that world like now? That pocket of existence that claims you as _its_ Max Caulfield, and not the girl with a wild id bleeding between strings in space-time? Are you an empty Max there, an echo of a ghost in another dimension?

You’ve run through the possibilities. 1. Nathan turned around and shot you, too, when you reached out to a dead stranger. 2. Nathan ran and panicked, and everything crashed down harder, sooner, faster. 3. Nathan no longer exists in that world, because you caught it with your eyes and hands and stayed it forever.

How far could you push yourself to rewind back to that moment—with the world still in perfect focus all around you? If you tried hard enough, would you get lost in the quantum in-between of a frozen reality? Could you really, permanently, undo the threads you’ve made _here_?

Could you bring her back? Could you save her again? Could you relive this week again and again and again—

—no matter how many times it takes, until you mold reality into a world you’ve only imagined?

A world _with_ Chloe Price, anchored in the here, and Max Caulfield stretched thin in space and possibility, frayed.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In another world, you’d remember Chloe Price. You would remember train tracks, blown-out junkyard tires, empty midnight diner runs. The rush and disgust of wet mud against your palms, and stray splinters and grass caught up in a skirt you probably spent too much on. Victoria/Chloe. AU.

In another world, you’d remember Chloe Price.

You would know the way she’d trace the tattoo of a blue star on your shoulder blade. How you’d look away with your face pressed against the edge of a pillow, tucked flat against your stomach as you lay on your bed. When the room, overheated, over-lit, welcomed a breeze from a cracked window. Snowfall. A track from the CD her friend from Seattle sent—the one she said “you were way too alike.”

(You would listen to it over and over, after you asked to borrow it. Just once. She called it “hippie trash.” But she laughed as she tossed the jewel case with the sharpied skull-and-crossbones onto your couch—and made you _promise_ to never lose it.)

You’d always see her face framed by a winter sky, because of how cold her fingers _always_ were, no matter the season or room. How warm her breath against your cheek (your neck, your stomach, your thighs) always seemed to be. Some days, her skin would burst with fruit and ash and cigarettes. Others, of the perfume you lent her when you said you’d fly her to Seattle, on the pretense of a gallery show.

(You made that broken promise after downing three too many. But she beat away your fumbled apologies with smiling lips crashed against yours, her disappointment tasting like your days-lost lip balm.)

You would remember train tracks, blown-out junkyard tires, empty midnight diner runs. The rush and disgust of wet mud against your palms, and stray splinters and grass caught up in a skirt you probably spent too much on. Rain. Stars. Cheap lawn chairs. Concrete, beach sand, broken glass. The quiet company of a thirty-something deadbeat with decent pot and a dog who didn’t hate you.

(Texts from “friends” wondering why you missed another party. Another paper you “forgot” to turn in.)

You’d know the girl who taught you how _not_ to care about galleries and contests, and stupid boys and their un-kept promises. You’d _know_ the girl neck-deep in homemade bruises and too many traffic tickets. The girl whose lies you could believe. Whose arms could wrap around your shoulders and shut out Blackwell and the Vortex Club. For a moment, never long enough.

Not before you’d fall back into _that_ toxic cycle—one that could never consume without Victoria Chase. (In _every_ universe.)

If this was another world, you know you’d remember Chloe Price. And you’d _be there_ the moment she set Arcadia Bay on fire.


End file.
